Live Music is one of the best VR video use cases

I’m thrilled to see the launch of Magenta Musik 360, the German music service from Telekom Deutschland. We’re proud to have been its partner in launching this innovative service, offering high quality videos, both traditional and VR/360 videos on multiple devices. With an innovative VR user experience it’s the first commercially available mass market live video service. It made its debut at the Rock am Ring event beginning of June with many more events coming up over the coming year.

Over the past month, I’ve been even more convinced that live music is one of the great use cases for VR video services. After the horrific terror event in Manchester and the false alarm at Rock am Ring, it’s clear that music lovers face even more challenges in going to concerts in the future. The entire music industry is dependent on a healthy live music industry and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that there are great risks to the continued growth of this market. With the continued development of VR with ever better video and audio experience, there will be possibilities to tap into new markets.

Of course, I don’t believe in the demise of live music, on the contrary. However, with high likelihood of further terror events at music events in the future costs for security at events will increase significantly, adding costs for visitors and significant challenges for artists at making each event profitable. All in all, I believe that Virtual Reality can be a great complement for artists to reach consumers with a “close to live” experience.

We can definitely see the improvements of the VR experience, with better headsets, better video and audio quality and with improvement in production value, but how quickly will consumers adopt this new technology? Clearly, VR is not a mass market technology yet, but penetration of devices is rising very quickly, piggybacking on the very powerful smart phones being launched in the market at the moment. It’s pretty clear that within a few years technology will have matured and spread to a level, making the business case for live music very viable. At Accedo, we’re working hard to innovate with products and solutions for this industry and our partnership with Deutsche Telekom is an important step on the way.